Monday, February 02, 2015

Left to the waves

Almost a decade's worth of hard work post-Katrina trying to get Louisiana its fair share of offshore oil revenues is about to be pissed away.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is
proposing that off-shore revenue sharing -- slated to begin in 2017 --
be scrapped with a plan that would provide "broad natural resource,
watershed and conservation benefits for the entire nation." The proposal
is part of the president's $4 trillion budget, unveiled Monday
(Feburary 2).

The revenue sharing, part of 2006 energy legislation co-sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., was expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for Louisiana for coastal restoration.

Sen. Bill Cassidy,
R-Baton Rouge, who defeated Landrieu in the 2014 Louisiana Senate race,
immediately promised a fight on the two Senate committees with
jurisdiction over the revenue sharing legislation -- Appropriations and
Energy. Last year, Landrieu chaired the Energy Committee.

"I will do everything in my power to use my seats on these committees
to not only block the President's raid on oil and gas revenues, but
fight to increase Louisiana's share of offshore revenue," Cassidy said.
"Funding for coastal restoration must remain a promise to Louisiana and
other Gulf Coast states."

Ha ha, freshman Senator Bill Cassidy will do everything in his power to help. Great.

Mary Landrieu made oil revenue sharing a top priority after Hurricane Katrina. Mary, like most Louisianians Republican and Democrat alike, reasoned that, since Louisiana has borne the nearly immeasurable costs of an eroding coastline and increasingly catastrophic flooding in order to provide "the entire nation" the benefit of extracting the state's fossil fuels, we ought to be reimbursed for our trouble. At least a little bit. It's a big mess, all of this, and it will cost us at least $50 billion just to keep it in check.

For a while, we even got the rest of the country to agree with us on that small point. Until 2015 when, I guess, Katrina is "over" so, hey, good luck! I'd say maybe we should sue somebody but Governor Jindal and Congressman Graves have already told us that's a bad idea.